Muslims in the East of Sri Lanka: Ashfaque Mohamed’s Insightful Film

Laleen Jayamanne, whose title is “Notes towards a Politics and Aesthetics of Film” in a review essay presented in The Island, 1 & 2 February 2023: the focus being Ashfaque Mohamed’s ‘Face Cover’ **

 

 ‘Face Cover’ by Ashfaque Mohamed

Asfaque  Mohamed

“Black cat, at the tip of my fingers pulsates poetry,

Desiring hands, yours, nudgingly pluck those roses of mine

In the soft light of the moon

The dreams we picked from the foaming edges of waves of the sea.”

                                                                          Jusla/Salani (in Face Cover)

Asifa, a young girl, and her elderly mother, living in Kattankudy, Baticaloa, are two fictional characters at the centre of Ashfaque Mohamed’s quietly powerful first feature film, titled Face Cover, which just premiered at the 2023 Jaffna International Film Festival (JIFF). As the President of the international jury judging the films in this year’s debut film competition at the JIFF (but on zoom from Australia), I have seen some highly sophisticated films from Bangladesh and India (the winners), immensely enjoyable and informative, but have chosen, for the purposes of this article, to write on Ashfaque’s thought provoking film that didn’t make it into the debut film competition. My decision to do so is part of my own politics as a film scholar who has, over the decades, often highlighted and laboured over films that may not necessarily be popular, or current, or even easily understood, for that matter.

Eye-catching films often are popular, and many critics spend a lot of energy writing about them as is their prerogative. I, too, do that when moved, as I have been by Baz Luhrmann’s hugely popular ELVIS. But, it’s important to me, as a Lankan-Australian film critic/scholar, to focus also on work that at first may appear opaque, may not fit into my own limited viewing habits and preferences, first and foremost. This way, I learn to learn from film even as I grow old. Face Cover has uncovered for me micro-histories of ethnic relations in Lanka in astonishing and moving ways. It’s certainly a film for our times, and in my opinion, Ashfaque is a young Lankan filmmaker of great promise. It is also heartening to note that he is cine-literate and (as he says), is self-taught as a filmmaker.

While the opening and closing screenings of the festival were at the Cinemas Movie Theatre, the rest of the festival films were shown at the University of Jaffna, largely due to the ongoing grave financial crisis affecting the country as a whole. I gather it’s the only film festival held in Sri Lanka, continuously, since the civil war ended, after 30 years, and is an admirable institution, powered by its Director, and curator of film, Anoma Rajakaruna’s unceasing energy and vision, which builds bridges among the various ethnic groups and cinephiles from across the entire country and crucially South Asia and further afield, in that once war-ravaged city. The following is the film’s blurb.

“Taking the cataclysmic Easter Sunday Bombings of Churches and Hotels in April 2019, by ISIS inspired Islamists in Sri Lanka as the point of departure, the film follows the life of Asifa in Kattankdy, in Eastern Sri Lanka, as she navigates the complex social forces shaping her and other women’s stories. The film tells the story of the town, as a woman’s tale. The film is experimental in form and mixes genres and conventions.”

*****

The main fictional story line of the mother and daughter is interwoven with (what appears at first to be), documentary interviews and testimonies given by ‘real’ people, not fictional characters. However, towards the end of the film one realises that the demarcating lines between documentary and fiction have indeed been blurred. There are hints of this earlier, in the four scenes forming the large sequence ‘performed’ on a proscenium stage, as well. This blurring appears to be the result of an unusual aesthetic and political decision, which I wish to explore here. Perhaps the politics of the film are linked to this bleeding of the actual into the fictional and the reverse also. How does this device enable Face Cover to uncover subtle operations of power in a predominantly Muslim area of Lanka, in the post-war era, soon after the Easter Sunday bombings as well? The feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political,’ certainly gets elaborated quietly but quite decisively in exploring the agency of the young Muslim girl, Asifa, on the cusp of womanhood, as well. I am assuming here (as I think the film itself does), that a politics of cinema has to work on two fronts simultaneously, not only on the choice of subject/story, but also on HOW it is told, elaborated. For what’s at stake are, our powers of perception and understanding, through images and sounds, that touch us in unexpected ways. Film, I believe, can be our mentor, we can learn from film in the most enjoyable and unexpected of ways, to undo our prejudiced ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking. Face Cover continues to be a revelation to me in this regard, even after multiple viewings, especially so.

Face Cover, the title of Ashafque’s film, is in itself fascinating. Why didn’t he use the globalised Arabic word Niqab for instance? The words ‘Face Cover’ (I learn), are the same in Tamil, the English words simply transliterated and incorporated into the vernacular. It is commonly used by Muslims to refer to the practice of partially covering a woman’s face, as required by some Muslim norms. A Tamil friend suggested that it connotes both the intimacy of a piece of cloth and a sense of distance of appropriated foreign words. Perhaps this sense of ambivalence is a unique Lankan invention not perceptible in the pure Arabic official word for the practice, which is Niqab. What’s fascinating to me is that, before I saw the film and learnt about the connotations of the title Face Cover, I thought it would be a ‘hot’, topical film on a subject that has caused a great deal of debate in the West (France for example), and protests, most recently in Iran which turned violent and then garnered supporters in some Western countries especially among some feminists. It’s a topic that the Western white media finds especially irresistible. But I was mistaken to take the title Face Cover at face value, as a sign of a polemical film. And what was most surprising to me about the film was that I wrote a long email to a friend, soon after I saw the film for the first time and realised the next day that I had said absolutely nothing about the ‘problem’ of the face cover, despite having discussed the film at some length.

When I realised what I had done, I resaw the film which brought up a lot of questions but no answers, so I saw the film yet again for the third time. This time round the film began to slowly open up to my attention. It is a film, I realised, that requires a quiet focus, an attentiveness, as when one enters an unfamiliar social milieu, like when one takes one’s shoes off to go into certain places of worship in Lanka, or as it happens to some houses in Australia. Similarly, while music is used, it does so very sparingly, so that when we do hear it, it speaks in a way that wall to wall music does not, cannot. In these ways our quality of attention is tuned like a musical instrument. In fact, the only time the face cover became a ‘hot topic’ in the film was when a Sinhala trader, in a shop, makes it so by shouting at a young woman wearing a face cover. He aggressively asks her why she has her face covered and the young girl responds forcefully, asking why he wants to see her face, etc. Apart from this verbal stoush, (the only time Sinhala is heard in the film), and one re-enactment on a stage, of an Army check-point scene, from the civil-war era, the face cover itself is not conceived as a ‘problem’ to be addressed by the film. In the staged check-point scene, a soldier, carrying a gun, orders a young woman, in Tamil, to unmask at the point of his gun and she simply obeys the command. The soldier is meant to be Sinhala speaking an accented Tamil. So apart from these two ‘dramatic’ incidents, instigated by hostile people with authority and power, the face cover is not a focus of the film, it’s simply a given. Though there is a strong criticism of the Muslim male undergraduate practice of erasing the faces of female office bearers on student council photographs, at several Universities. A young Muslim woman astutely refers to this gender discrimination as a ‘digital veiling,’ images of which are displayed. This kind of internal criticism is very forceful and one hopes that Muslim male undergraduates will reflect on it and mend their ways. The check-point scene does function as a parable. More on the use of dramatic parables later, in a film where there is very little ‘drama’ in this sense of confrontations. Instead, momentous events transpire on Television News of the Easter Sunday bombings which frames the film and dates it to be set in 2019. But previous violent histories are folded into every-day-life and narrated as recollections, and an inventive mix of techniques of staged interviews and testimonies and ‘real’ interviews, replace drama, understood as actions and reactions reaching a crescendo.

Sumathy Sivamohan as Asifa’s mother

Often the interviews are played as voice-over while the person concerned goes about her every-day business, mute. This technique makes the film’s narration flexible, allowing room to play with our attention, an eye here and the ear there. I think that Ashfaque’s ethico-aesthetic sensibility evident here is a part of his film politics. I find myself listening attentively to the voice-over which rhetorically oscillates between answers to questions (which are themselves unheard), and an interior monologue. I found the texture, timbre, inflections and rhythms of the voices, especially those of the mother and daughter, very engaging, moving. Lankan cinema has not developed the autonomous potentialities of the sound track as much as it could, I think.

Face Cover as a Lure

I was a bit slow to realise that the title, Face Cover, is a lure. It lures us into the film as a certain idea of the veil might. The veil is an alluring metaphysical idea in Kumar Shahani’s film Khyal Gatha for instance, which explores both Hindu Bhakti and Sufi Islamic traditions of spirituality as expressed in music, song and art in India which bypass both the priest and the religious institutions they control. ‘Khayal’ is an Urdu word derived from Persian which means ‘imagination,’ and is the name of a classical musical form. The idea of the ‘veil’ in Persian Sufi traditions is a complex idea, put very simply, it suggests that, reality itself is veiled (filtered, subtilised), and its perception depends on certain spiritual aesthetic practices, which reveal the imperceptible and the intangible, within the hum-drum of every-day existence. The veil as a spiritual idea, on the one hand, and the mask or ‘face cover’ socially mandated by certain Islamic patriarchal assumptions, on the other, are of course worlds apart in their conception and function and the feelings they evoke. As devout Roman Catholic girls, taught religion by Irish Catholic nuns at school, we always had to cover our heads modestly with veils when going to church.

 Asifa and friend

I personally loved wearing a veil to church, especially my Spanish-mantilla. And then I remembered how most of the paintings of the Virgin-Mother Mary in the European tradition have presented her with her head covered as was the custom of Middle Eastern peoples of the Book (Jews, Christians and Muslims), who lived in desert lands. It is/was a cultural practice of peoples of the desert, first and foremost, before the three Middle Eastern religions of ‘The Book’ took it up in their own creative ways. And now it strikes me as strange that we thought it quite normal and proper that our dear Roman Catholic nuns at school wore white layered ‘habits’ and covered their head and hair completely with a long black cotton veil. The forehead was also covered with a white band of cloth. Cultural habits need so much contextualisation to comprehend in our globalised world with instant manufacture of opinion.

But the Persian theosophical idea of the ‘veil’ as a subtilisation of matter is a rich source for imagining the film image/sound, beyond its capitalist market value as a commodity that controls and extracts our sensations for profit. Henry Corbin, the celebrated Professor of Islam at the Sorbonne University in Paris and Teheran University, spent much of his life translating and editing the work of the Iranian theosophist/mystic Suhrawardi (1154-1191). Suhrawardi’s work offer glimpses of such a cosmoscentric-image, suspended, he says, as in a mirror, between the purely empirical sense perception and the purely intellectually abstract domain. Great filmmakers like Sergei Paradyanov reached towards such a vision of film in his last film Ashik Kerib, about a Sufi Minstrel’s wanderings across the deeply multi-cultural, war-torn, Caucasus where Christians and Muslims were killing each other in the name of their own religions. The scholarly literature on Henri Corbin refers to him as a mystic, while his guru Suhrawardi the Sufi mystic, was executed as a heretic. In recent times the shrines of popular Sufi saints have been desecrated in Pakistan and the followers subjected to violence by Islamic Fundamentalist who believe in the letter of the law rather than in its spirit.

One might then ask, towards what does Ashfaque’s film lure us, through an oblique use of the vernacular title? It takes us to the heart of a relationship between a young Muslim woman and her older and rather weary, but utterly devoted mother, played (as one Indian film distributor put it), ‘soulfully’, by Professor Sumathy Sivamohan, a Tamil. I thought this is worth mentioning, given the themes of the film. And through the intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship in their home, we who are Sinhala outsiders, are also made more receptive to look, listen and understand the recent micro-histories of the densely populated Muslim township of Kattankudy. We learn that it is a township of a majority of Muslim people who have suffered a great deal of violence during the civil war (caught between, the LTTE, IPKF and the Lankan army), and in its difficult aftermath, in the context of the 2019 Easter Sunday Bombings of churches and hotel across the country, by the ISIS influenced group, one of whom, Zaharan Hashim, was from this very place. In this film we experience the intricacies of ethnic relations from below, from where the suffering and violence are remembered and brought into speech, largely, but not only by women. Intra-ethnic sectarian and class conflicts among the Muslim populations are also brought into the discourse, not covered up. But the focus on the lives of several girls and that of the maternal figure anchors the film so that it can inter-weave their stories and cut-through laterally into the blood-soaked memories, without actually showing the violence enacted. This is an important political decision that several South Asian debut films at the festival have made. They testify to historical and current ongoing violence while refusing to represent it, show it. This is part of their politics.

In the Lankan cinema, between 1947 to 1979, that I have studied, there has never been a feature film where the main protagonists are Muslim and set in a predominantly Muslim area. When a Muslim man occasionally appeared in a Sinhala film as a trader, it was more often than not as comic relief, making fun of the person’s accented Sinhala or his fez hat. Whereas, in Face Cover we have an entire Muslim community brought into focus through its young and older women and the elderly mother. This is a productive strategy because it allows Ashfaque to go right into the domestic sphere of women, the bedroom and kitchen as well, which he does with great tact as a Muslim ‘man with a movie-camera’. A surprising scene happens in the kitchen when the mother and a relative are preparing food packets for sale, it would appear, and gossiping about a potential suitor for Asifa. Hearing what is being said she comes in quietly and firmly tells her mother that she is not interested in a marriage to the man in question who drives the blue tuk tuk. The aunt, instead of addressing Asifa, tells the mother that it would be sensible to take up the offer because she has no help from a husband, as he is dead. Surprisingly, the mother sides with Asifa in saying, ‘he is short, I don’t think it will work’. This is delightfully modern dialogue, I think, assuming that the girl’s likes and dislikes do matter in the choice of a husband, in what we (Sinhala folk), tend to of think of as an ultra-traditional community. This strong point is made quietly, in understated humour, without any drama. And Asifa does get to marry the man of her choice (of a suitable height one imagines), despite initial objections from the boy’s more prosperous family.

The tact of Ashfaque’s camera is seen in the use of long to medium shots, in many scenes, even in emotional ones when a woman gives her personal testimony of the wrongful arrest of her husband for instance. The maintaining of a distance has an ethical force, though it is an actor who delivers the moving testimony, I learn later. Asifa who is seen wearing a head scarf at home is often filmed from either behind or from the side, sometimes her shadow, obliquely, in mid-to-close-shots and because of how she wears the head scarf her profile is not visible. At first, I was irritated by this but when it was repeated, while other young faces were quite visible, I came to realise that there were other values, rather than taboos, expressed in this oblique angle of the camera. As Jean Marie Straub, the great Marxist filmmaker, who recently died, said, where one places the camera is a political decision. Over the years, his films, made with his wife, the late Daniel Huillet, showed us how to understand this profound idea about the power built into the gaze of the camera. Ashfaque is from East Coast and has dedicated the film to his own mother, Ummu Rahuma. At times one feels that he might be filming his own mother in the way he collaborates with Sivamohan’s maternal figure. It is so very rare to see an older woman, who is a ‘housewife’, given so much screen time in the Lankan cinema and indeed in many other cinemas as well. Chantal Akerman’s classic feminist film Jean Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxells (1975), comes to mind as a rare film centred on a housewife and her daily routines. Akerman said that it was made as a tribute to her mother and women like her. When the mother hears from Asifa that several bombs have gone off all over the island, she turns round and sits on the floor saying, ‘Those LTTE boys… More trouble for us!’, not remembering that the LTTE were defeated by the Lankan armed forces in 2009. Similarly, when Asifa shows her a Face Book video of the Supermarket scene where a Muslim girl is abused in Sinhala for wearing a mask, she looks at the cell phone for a while and returns it saying ‘I don’t understand…’ Despite this lack of connection with aspects of what’s going on politically around her, she tells her cousin regretfully that Asifa doesn’t have a Tamil friend, that she studied in a different school, a Muslim school. Then she says that they have lived there in Katankudy from very early times and for generations, when there was ‘no Muslim and Tamil, then’. These are communities where people of different ethnicities and religions have lived together for generations, peaceably, we learn.

So, I am wondering what sort of politics this film explores and brings forth within a blood- soaked history and memory of a town, (Kattankudy), a region (Batticoloa), and a country (Lanka). There is no militant gesture linked to big ‘P’ politics in the film, but the effects of the civil war have marked people and they offer their thoughts and memories to the camera as witnesses to past crime whose effects are still felt. The attentive camera is a witness here, a part of its politics. An Imam of a large mosque speaks of the massacre that occurred there by LTTE gunmen, while the devotees were at prayer, on August 3, 1990, which he considers an event of world historical significance, as we are shown black & white photographs of dead bodies splattered in blood. The bullet holes on the walls of the mosque still remain as testimony to that crime.

*****

There is nearly a hundred-year history to the idea of ‘political cinema,’ linked to the State in the former Soviet Union. The first generation of Soviet filmmakers were all supporters of the Bolshevik revolution and tried in their own unique ways to both theorise their practice and also develop political films with vitality and imagination, perceptible even now. They also taught at the Soviet film school, the first of its kind in the world. Lenin famously said, ‘Of all the Arts, film is the most important one for us’, because of the large illiterate peasantry in Russia who he thought could be educated by filmed history of the revolution and its hopes for the future. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Dovzenko are among the most illustrious of Soviet filmmakers of the silent era, who made films to promote the revolution and its ideals in its several facets. More often than not their political sympathies are clearly stated in their films, but they had very different, competing ideas, of how to make them, as is evident in their theories of Montage which has created a theoretical lineage with a deep history still alive.

The great Latin American film manifestoes from Argentina, Brazil and Cuba also promoted an explicit political activist cinema in the 1960s. Each of these countries issued Cine-Manifestoes (Towards a 3rd Cinema, Aesthetics of Hunger, Towards a Poor Cinema) declaring programmatically the kind of political cinema they wished to create, sometimes against great odds, fighting military rule. We don’t have such well formulated traditions of political cinema. In India Ritwick Ghatak was the key figure in developing ideas of political cinema by using Bengali traditions in tune with Brechtian Marxist ideas as well. He taught film making at the Pune film school and wrote about it as well. But Lankan cinema has evolved to engage critically with the social and political life of the country at least since the pioneering work of Dharmasena Pathiraja in the early 1970s, with Ahas Gaua (1971) and Ponmani (1987, Tamil).

What appears to be special in the digital era of filmmaking in South Asia, especially, is the relatively easy access to the technology and technical knowledge now and the evolution of film cultures and festivals across South Asia and elsewhere which have created a new cinematic public sphere, more democratically global than before. I hope there is also well thought out theoretical-critical writing that can feed into filmmaking practices so they can improve and imagine what is impossible. Also, studying film histories is essential and now so easily accessible as well. Cultural memory is sustained through writing because film festivals are intense events, but in their ephemerality, fade away.

Ashfaque’s Tracking-Shots: Walking and Driving

 Asifa

There is a sense of freedom of movement in Face Cover, in the way it’s filmed, which is surprising because of the immediate connotations of the title which conjures up a restriction on movement of girls. This is so also because of the cliches we have imbibed through the media, especially in the West, about what a Muslim woman is or what she can do in traditional Islamic cultures. Since 9/11 this hostile discourse on Islam has never ceased in the West. In Face Cover, at the end when the actress playing Asifa speaks as herself, unmasked, addressing us directly, about her character and her approach to the role, it is very surprising indeed. She introduces herself as a University student who has never acted and says that she didn’t think about her character much because she was told that the girl she played was an ordinary girl, not someone special. She also tells us that there are many cliches prevalent about what a Muslim girl or woman is. This self-reflexive discourse reconfigures the film in one’s mind. We then wonder which interviews were staged with actors and which are real people speaking of their personal experience. In luring us to do this the film gathers a density and richness such that the cliches we might have thought with, are dispelled or at the very least seen for what they are.

Women and girls are seen walking comfortably all over the town with relaxed ease, on beaches and on empty land with tall palm trees, and on streets, either by themselves or in twos. A small protest group of feminists carry lanterns and walk cross a bridge demanding an end to violence against women. We see a woman on a motor bicycle. Asifa’s mother is seen doing her daily routine to the shops, chatting with other women in passing. These movements form an integral part of the rhythm of the film. The other smooth, fast paced tracking-movement on main roads and in the suburbs are shot from a moving vehicle, while voice-overs narrate the numerous incidents of violence, internal displacement of Muslims by the LTTE for example and the difficulties of resettlement among Muslims who suspect them of Tiger sympathies. These broadly descriptive tracking shots give the film an elan, creating different rhythms from that of the tracking shots of walking and orient us spacially in the township. Sivamohan who was also a consultant on the film, uses the tracking shot stylistically, in her own films such as One Single Tumbler.

Cell Phones – Poetry – Bicycle Rides

The multiplicity of uses the cell phone is put to in the film is refreshing in its ability to shift our focus and sense of scale, casually. Asifa meets a boy on line and he proposes to her online and she has agreed to marry him and says so to the mother candidly, firmly and sweetly. She carries out a small business on line and of course chats with friends. The cell phone screen is shown in extreme close-up, of images of a girl wearing a head scarf but her face is cut in half by the framing and another of a full-face cover in black, which because of its enlarged scale, is quite a powerful image with only the eyes visible. They discuss the shaming of girls on Face Book and how it affects their reputations. But it is also shown as a portal, to by pass the patriarchal adult world of injunctions and restrictions that have proliferated since the remittance of wages and Wahabi Islamic ideas from Saudi Arabia began to arrive in the community and different Islamic associations are formed with varying ideologies. The cell phone’s use creates a sense of light humour too when the mother, standing outside her window, eavesdrops on a long girly chat between Asifa and a friend, about how she met her boyfriend.

A young woman poet introduces herself as Jusla and says she writes under the pen name of Salari. She recites a poem, seated near a man and a little girl. The young man who shyly listens to it is in fact her husband and the smiling little girl, her daughter. In one shot we see the husband seated near a vase of red flowers, listening pensively to his wife reading her poem and then there is an exchange between them. This intricate sequence of multiple shots of the poet and her young husband, is full of surprises about gender relations within a Muslim marriage and female creativity. I cite fragments from a poem Jusla recites, interspersed with bits of conversation with her husband, about her desire to write.

“All these poems were written before marriage…I had had dealings with some man before marriage. I want to talk about this poem in that connection; Snakes Made of Glass!”

You speak slowly of who I am

(Jusla stands and then walks out of house as her voice-over continues the poem)

On the clothes hanger hangs a beautiful golden coloured pouch

I remember an intimacy swinging on that hanger.

(Husband seated at a table with a red vase of flowers, listening to the poem in VO)

It is the colour of the blue sea.

It was given to me for keeping small change and the phone card

(Jusla is now seated on a veranda in long shot, alone)

Overflowing with dreams

In the shape of an orange

And other sundry stuff

It is full of mysteries

It carries the memory of the man who struck me from behind

When he passed by

The beggar who caressed my hand when he received his coins”

(The two seated side by side)

“What have you written about me? Interesting stuff?” asks the husband smiling shyly, playfully.

Jusla laughs.

“It’s all good, People say they are good poems. I need to reengage with writing, only then will my mind be at peace. I need your permission. I have been waiting all this while for it.”

I have quoted from Jusla’s poem as a way of also remembering that Islam has given rise to so much love poetry in Urdu, in the Indian subcontinent alone. When artists in Delhi decided to create a response to anti-Muslim Hindutva violence in Gujarat, singers of Hindustani music and Muslim Ghazal singers sang together to a mass audience in Delhi.

Asifa’s Father

 Asifa and Father

 

I will conclude with, what for me, is the most poignant image in the film. It is seen at the beginning and at the end of the film, accompanied with the sound of a violin or sita. It’s that of the little Asifa in her white uniform, knee high socks and white shoes, riding on the bar of her father’s bicycle to school. A fluid frontal tracking shot on a busy road, shows the well-built man (now dead), protectively cycling his little girl to school. In its repetition, it appears as a singular poetic refrain resonating across the film we have just watched. Asifa’s mother should, however, have the last words. She tells her cousin who acts as the marriage broker, that Asifa will inherit the house as her dowery and when this appears insufficient, she says, quietly and poignantly, ‘but she likes him’. At another time she says that, unlike herself, she wanted Asifa to become ‘somebody’ through education. And she discusses her employment prospects with care and the pragmatism of a worldly woman.

A NOTE: This incisive review of an important cinematic interpretation was sent to me by Jayantha Somasundaram of Canberra.

NOTE TWO: For some dimensions of the poltics of the Eastern Province and the recent Easter Sunday jihadist attacks engineered by a jihadist gorip from that arena, see the follwoing articles as “beginners’:

Ameer Ali, ACL  2009a “The Transformation of Muslim Politics in Sri Lanka and the Growth of Wahhabism from the 1980s,” 5 May 2009, https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/the-transformation-of-muslim-politics-in-sri-lanka-and-the-growth-of-wahhabism-from-the-1980s/

Roberts, Michael 2017 “Anguish as Empowerment … and A Path to Retribution,” 22 March 2017,

https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/?p=24595&preview=true

Roberts, Michael 2019 “Slippages: Where ‘Muslim’ is An Ethnic Label as well as a Religious Typification,”  3 May 2018, https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/slippages-where-muslim-is-an-ethnic-label-as-well-as-a-religious-typification/

Roberts, Michael: 2019  “”The Clash of Civilisations and Hate at the Heart of 21/4 in Sri Lanka,”14 May 2019, https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/the-clash-of-civilisations-and-hate-at-the-heart-of-21-4-in-sri-lanka/#more-35621

MAM Shukri: Muslims of Sri Lanka, Beruwela, 1986

Thuppahi Item:  2019 “The Death Toll in Sri Lanka: Ethnicity,”  4 May 2019, https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/the-death-toll-in-sri-lanka-ethnicity/

Ameen Izzadeen and Abdullah Shahnawaz 2019 “The Emergence of Salafi Jihadists in the Kattankudy Locality in the Eastern Province,” 28 April 2019, https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/the-emergence-of-salafi-jihadists-in-the-kattankudy-locality-in-the-eastern-province/